Gail Alexan­der

Leave po­lice op­er­a­tions to the Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er. That is the warn­ing from Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley to Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er who, Row­ley said, was "as­sum­ing" the role of the Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er. "I?call on the Prime Min­is­ter to rein in the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty,"?Row­ley added at yes­ter­day's week­ly PNM?me­dia brief­ing.

Say­ing Warn­er was act­ing in an "ob­nox­ious" way, Row­ley said he (Warn­er) was on the scene of a re­cent killing of two peo­ple by the po­lice and had con­grat­u­lat­ed the of­fi­cers urg­ing them to "fight fire with fire." Row­ley said that sort of sce­nario was no place for a politi­cian to try to score po­lit­i­cal points by that be­hav­iour and there was no place in the sit­u­a­tion for the "min­is­ter and his brava­do" since if there were chal­lenges to the killings, the po­lice could end up in dif­fi­cul­ty.

He added: "The min­is­ter is reck­less and im­pos­si­ble and he con­tin­ues to be­have as though he has bars on his shoul­ders and he is a gen­er­al call­ing po­lice sta­tions 'my sta­tions', (but) he has no po­lice in this coun­try," Row­ley said. He said po­lice op­er­a­tions must be done with­out fear or favour, mal­ice or ill-will and must be un­der the guid­ance of the in­de­pen­dent of­fice of Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er.

Row­ley added: "We will not tol­er­ate any guid­ance of po­lice op­er­a­tions or in­volve­ment by any politi­cian in po­lice op­er­a­tions in T&T and if that is Gov­ern­ment's an­ti-crime plan we re­ject it since the sec­ond phase will be worse than the first. "We will have a po­lice body that sees it­self be­ing op­pres­sive­ly or pa­tro­n­is­ing­ly man­aged by politi­cians who have their own agen­da, (so) leave po­lice op­er­a­tions to the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice."

Row­ley said the Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er's of­fice seemed to be re­ced­ing fur­ther away. He said Warn­er had been on the scene of the Debe re­moval of the re-route move­ment. He not­ed last year's state of emer­gency al­so was de­clared in the ab­sence of the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Row­ley's dis­missed Warn­er's claim that crime was not "so bad." He said last year Gov­ern­ment had called the emer­gency?af­ter sev­en peo­ple were killed and that sev­en peo­ple al­so had been killed close to the first an­niver­sary of the emer­gency.

Row­ley said Warn­er had put him­self above the law and the po­lice and po­lice now did not want to in­ves­ti­gate him, even on the ad­vice of the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions. The PNM leader al­so said Warn­er told a "bla­tant false­hood" that Row­ley's of­fice was in­ac­tive dur­ing the re­cent flood. He said he had been "out in the field' with con­stituents since ear­ly on the morn­ing of the flood. He said his of­fice was open the next morn­ing and his of­fice had sup­port staff of Par­lia­ment of­fi­cers who had no re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to re­spond to the flood.